Star Wars - Redemption
by CdnJAGScribe
Summary: The Force, Luke, Rey and a whole lot of regrets. How will Luke lay the ghosts of betrayal to rest so he can train Rey to defeat the First Order and The Knights of Ren?


"Star Wars - Redemption"

Summary: The Force, Luke, Rey and a whole lot of regrets. How will Luke lay the ghosts of betrayal to rest so he can train Rey to defeat the First Order and The Knights of Ren?

Disclaimer: Star Wars and all canon characters contained within belong to the creative minds at Disney and Episode IV-VI characters created by George Lucas and owned by Disney. I'm just playing in the sandbox.

 ** _PROLOGUE_**

The screams of the dying still echoed like phantoms that would never leave; agonizing in their intensity, their psychic impact through the Force hitting him like hammer blows driving him to his knees.

That blade, the red triune blade that shimmered and sizzled like a beacon of hellfire that cut through his students with no mercy, had haunted his nightmares, and every waking moment of the torturous existence that seemed to know no end.

Betrayal seemed to be the hallmark of his life. Not the first was the harsh reality of losing the two most important people in the world. Coming back to the only home he'd ever known to find their charred corpses. He realized his outlook on life itself had changed at that very moment on the desert planet of his childhood. It had been a bitter dose to swallow at the time as they were all he had known. Then the subtle lie of his first Master. His second Master was no better, continually admonishing him that attachments were a path to the Dark Side.

And amidst those betrayals, the Force had helped him on a path of atonement, of reunion and five years after the war, to find love. Oh, how he had adored her; her acerbic wit, her sarcasm, the fact that she didn't think of him as a Hero of the Rebellion and how she knew just how to keep this humble former moisture farmer in line. He married her a year later and they had nineteen happy years together until one of his students had betrayed him by turning to the Dark Side.

And not just any student; but his blood kin. The son of his sister. The child he had personally trained in the ways of the Force. And yet that had not been the ultimate betrayal of all.

He'd wanted her to live and she had for a brief few moments after he'd reached her side. With her last few breaths, her body fatally pierced by the red blade of his nephew, only the scorched burn mark on her Jedi cloak showing where it has passed through, she'd gasped "Protect our daughter..." And she drew her last as her spirit joined the Force; her body vanishing to leave only her Jedi rainments behind. Falling to his knees, he'd loosed a howl of bereavement that had echoed through the Force, painful in the intensity of his loss.

But even the loss of his wife had paled in comparison to the betrayal he had perpetrated against his own daughter, against his wife's dying wishes. Abandoning his own blood kin on a desert planet so long ago that he'd forgotten the name of it. Whether it was the fact that his daughter reminded him of his wife so much that it was too painful to keep her with him or whether it actually was protection that he had offered in giving her up; he had protected her in some way, he thought bitterly, _if I cannot remember the planet, they can't get it out of me._ His reasoning was sound if warped. She would grow up safe, not knowing the dangers of the galaxy. _I attract too many dangers to me for her to stay with me._ Yet no matter how many times over the years; the many endless days of his exile on this planet, his mind and emotions still turned towards his daughter. He wondered if his daughter still lived, she would be nearly an adult, whether she had found someone, a family to call her own. He knew she was Force-strong; he and his late wife had known that from the time they knew she was in the womb. He had left her on the backwater planet in the hopes that she would live out a normal life away from the capricious and cruel whims of the Force. He had tried to convince himself that this choice had been the best for her, that it had been so that the Knights of Ren, as the so called Dark Force users had monikered themselves, could not find her. So many had fallen to his nephew's hand and once again he was the last of the Jedi. Better that his daughter not have to deal with her powers at all. _Let her live a normal life._

...but his heart didn't agree with his logic...how he missed his wife; how he missed his daughter...and all the years of his self-imposed exile weighed on him as heavily as a reek resting it's bulk on the center of his chest. The magnificent view of cliffs and rocks below where he was kneeling, and the span of the greenish blue ocean stretched out before him, blurred because of the moisture suddenly misting his vision. The last Jedi in the galaxy hammered by the weight of his memories, the voices ceasing slightly to give his tortured soul some brief respite, gazed upon the gravestone where he had buried all of what was left of the woman he'd loved with all his soul and betrayed by not acceding to her dying wishes, mourning the decision of abandoning his daughter, laid his head on the stone and wept.

However the fate of the galaxy was always in motion; the Force's Will would not be hindered. It took brief notice of the repentant Jedi Master on the planet of Ahch-To and calculated it's options.

...and ultimately unbeknownst to him, the Force had other plans for Luke Skywalker.


End file.
